Festicket has entered Australia’s colorful — and growing — festivals space.
The U.K.-based festival travel portal has already signed-up with a number of Aussie promoters and festivals, including The Grass Is Greener, Beyond the Valley, Jungle Love, Grapevine Gathering NSW, Pleasure Garden, Mountain Sounds, plus Rhythm & Vines? and Rhythm & Alps in New Zealand.
Australia hosts some of the world’s most unique and remote festivals, notes Zack Sabban, Festicket’s CEO & co-founder. With its antipodean expansion, Festicket aims to help these fests reach new audiences and make life easier for local party-goers and those coming from further afield.
“We’ve grown a lot, particularly in the last three years,” Sabban tells Billboard. “Now feels like the right time to be expanding into new regions and Australia is a particularly fertile one when it comes to festivals.”
Established in early 2012, Festicket packages tickets with travel, accommodation and other add-ons to create “complete festival trips, and has worked with upwards of 1,000 music fests in 50 countries. Headquartered in London with European offices in Berlin, Amsterdam and Porto, the company boasts a global network of 4,500 suppliers for accommodation and tourist packages and has assisted more than 800,000 live music fans.
Multi-day camping festivals are growing in popularity in Australia, notes Sabban, and the market is emerging as a destination for jet-setters. “Australia is on many of our existing customer base bucket lists anyway,” he notes. Also, Australia’s crop of bands and artists are “extremely popular abroad, especially in the European indie and electronic scene,” he explains. “It all adds to the allure of Australia as a music destination.”
Currently, Festicket has a business development and campaign management team for Asia Pacific based in its London and Amsterdam offices. “We’re looking into partnerships and will expand the team as the client base in APAC grows,” Sabban adds.
Festicket arrives ahead of the busy southern summer, and as new data suggests the festivals market Down Under is in decent shape. Contemporary festivals reported 26 per cent gains in revenue last year, according to a report published last week by Live Performance Australia, as a handful of festivals brands, including the traveling Download and Good Things events, test the market.
Festicket recently made its first U.S. appointment, tapping Lauren Pye as president, North America.
